Hi,If I'm not totally mistaken (been a while since I've used a serial printer for anything), the parallel should be a fair amount quicker- the only thing I remember about the serials is it was easier/cheaper to find long serial cables, which was important when a server in the server room or on another floor was doing print server duties for a printer in a publicly accessible area....
I recently got my hands on a free (woowho!) HP 4050 printer. I'm going to hook it up to a FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE server. The printer has two serial (one male/one female) connectors, a Centronix port, and some odd looking port that looks like you plug a mouse into it.
The handbook states that I can use serial or parallel cabling to a postscript capable printer but there may be some advantage to a serial cable as it is bi-directional. I've got several newer IEEE something-or-another parallel cables lying around unused. They were rather expensive and, IIRC, proported to be bi-directional.
Question: Is a serial hookup preferable to parallel? As a future possiblity, this modest FBSD box may become a dedicated print server with a color laser and ink jet also hanging off it. I'll probably install CUPS and "share" it with windows users via Samba.
Thanks for your input
Any reasonably modern parallel cable and parallel port is also bi-directional, so the only advantage I see with serial is if you're cabling it like above...
Scott
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